Services are provided in various ways. For example, services are provided in-house by a service provider or by a company itself, or are outsourced to a requesting customer. With the latter, a customer, such as a company, requests that a particular service be provided to the company. For instance, the company may request consulting services. With such a request, the company specifies the number of desired hours of labor and/or other requirements.
In order to purchase the number of hours of labor and/or other requirements, one or more service elements representing the requirements are created by the service provider and purchased by the company. This defines for the company what is provided and at what cost.
The development of a service element is performed based on assumptions made by a service element designer. Validity of those assumptions is ascertained based on empirical data collected in response to use of the service element. Therefore, a need exists for a capability that facilitates collection and analysis of measurement data usable, for instance, to tune and adjust future versions of service elements.